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Aesthetics of interaction: a literature synthesis

Published: 26 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

New technologies provide expanded opportunities for interaction design. The growing number of possible ways to interact, in turn, creates a new responsibility for designers: Besides the product's visual aesthetics, one has to make choices about the aesthetics of interaction. This issue recently gained interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Based on a review of 19 approaches, we provide an overview of today's state of the art. We focused on approaches that feature "qualities", "dimensions" or "parameters" to describe interaction. Those fell into two broad categories. One group of approaches dealt with detailed spatio-temporal attributes of interaction sequences (i.e., action-reaction) on a sensomotoric level (i.e., form). The other group addressed the feelings and meanings an interaction is enveloped in rather than the interaction itself (i.e., experience). Surprisingly, only two approaches addressed both levels simultaneously, making the explicit link between form and experience. We discuss these findings and its implications for future theory building.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    NordiCHI '14: Proceedings of the 8th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Fun, Fast, Foundational
    October 2014
    361 pages
    ISBN:9781450325424
    DOI:10.1145/2639189
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. aesthetics of interaction
    2. experience design
    3. interaction attributes
    4. interaction design
    5. review

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    NordiCHI '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 89 of 361 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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    • (2023)Bringing Design Patterns to Life: Applying Christopher Alexander’s Theory of Living Structure in HCIInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.226228540:22(7214-7232)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
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